The Vice-President of the European Commission, Věra Jourová, regretted the European Parliament’s rejection on Thursday 20 January of two proposals for delegated regulations supplementing the 2019 regulation on the determination of cases in which “identity data may be considered identical or similar for the purpose of detecting multiple identities”, in the context of the interoperability of EU information systems.
The rejection, approved by 353 votes to 336 with 4 abstentions in the first case and 355 to 334 with 4 abstentions in the second, could complicate the implementation by the end of 2023 of the interoperability of European information systems, she added. The European Commission will “continue technical discussions” with the Parliament.
The aim is to facilitate the detection of multiple identities and to reduce manual work for authorities. The Parliament explained its refusal by the fact that the delegated regulation does not define the procedures for determining when identity data can be considered similar. The text sub-delegates this authority to the EU Agency for the Operational Management of Large-scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (eu-LISA) and to experts from the European Commission, Member States, and EU agencies that use EU information systems and interoperability elements.
The texts in question provide for eu-LISA to use an algorithm to calculate the similarity between identity data in different fields and from different information systems based on predetermined similarity thresholds.
Links to the rejected texts: https://bit.ly/3qI7lYI ; https://bit.ly/3qMIzXw (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)